December 27, 2009, Sunday

In August, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA released Volume 1 of its report on why the space shuttle crashed. As expected, the ship's foam insulation was the main cause of the disaster. But the board also fingered another unusual...

December 14, 2003, Sunday

EDWARD R. TUFTE'S books have a certain austere elegance about them, starting with ''The Visual Display of Quantitative Information'' (1983), which sold hundreds of thousands of copies and made his reputation as a guru of information graphics. So when...

February 6, 2000, Sunday

It is well past noon and the 286 Manhattan office workers have been kept in their chairs all morning with another four hours to go. Still, they're hooting in guilty laughter as they stare at the confident emcee, who is striding around in front of a...

August 3, 1997, Sunday

By D. J. BRUCKNER; D. J. R. Bruckner is an editor of The New York Times Book Review. His book on the American type designer F. W. Goudy will be published by Abrams in November

LEAD: Often the presentation of information obscures its meaning. To Edward R. Tufte, the correction of this scandal lies in design. He has made it his mission to turn statistical tables, scientific observations, schedules, maps, timetables and much...

September 2, 1990, Sunday

LEAD: Whether one can decipher a schedule quickly enough to catch a train or interpret a navigation chart in time to avoid treacherous rocks depends a great deal on how clearly hundreds of pieces of information - facts and statistics - are ordered...

August 5, 1990, Sunday

AMONG the trends in personal computing, two - the proliferation of graphics and the coming of compact disks for read-only memory - seem to be garnering the greatest attention at the moment. Both pose significant potential problems. Consider the...